{Tsukurimashou: a Japanese-language font meta-family}
{Matthew Skala}
{\MF-based font projects for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (\CJK)
languages have been announced every few years since the early 1980s,
even predating the current form of the \MF\ language.  Except for a few
non-parameterized conversions of fonts that originated in other formats,
in 30 years every \MF\ \CJK\ font has been abandoned at or before the
8-bit barrier of 256 kanji, nowhere near the thousands required for
practical typesetting.  In this presentation I describe the first
project to break that barrier: Tsukurimashou
(\url{http://tsukurimashou.sourceforge.jp/}), currently at over 1400
kanji (as well as kana, Latin, and Korean hangul) and steadily growing.
I discuss technical and human challenges facing this kind of project,
how to solve them, and spin-off technologies such as the {\tt IDSgrep}
kanji structural query system.}